Adobe is making a major move into the cloud. The company has just announced the next version of its flagship digital editing tools, Creative Suite, and for the first time the new products will only be available through the company's online subscription service. Adobe previously offered standalone editions of each product, which users could choose to keep or upgrade as new editions were released, but now the only way to receive major feature updates to the product series will be to remain subscribed to the $49.99 per month service.

The company is giving its application suite a new, but familiar name to emphasize the change: Adobe Creative Cloud will be replacing Creative Suite 6, the version released last year. The product series has been on a yearly release cycle since 2011, and this latest upgrade includes new features for nearly every product in the series, including Photoshop, Illustrator, and Premiere Pro, all of which now have their name appended with CC, instead of CS.

All of the apps in Creative Cloud will be replaced with the newly upgraded ones when Adobe releases them on June 17th. The company will continue to sell standalone copies of Creative Suite 6 applications for now, but it will not continue to update them with new features.As the products' new naming scheme suggests, Adobe is enhancing the cloud integration between all of its services. The company says that a new desktop companion app will be able to automatically keep every app up to date. It's also integrating many of the apps with Behance, a site that allows artists to present their work and receive feedback from others. Adobe purchased the website in December, and it will now use the Creative Cloud companion app as a way to notify users of any comments made on their work.

Though Adobe is drawing a focus to its cloud services, it isn't actually changing much about them. Instead, this series of updates is tailored toward streamlining the interactions between apps and websites, rather than adding cloud-centric features. But for Adobe, the subscription requirement could help to stem the continual threat of piracy, while also making its products both more accessible to new users and more expensive in the long run.

As usual, the best known app of the suite — Photoshop — is receiving a number of major features to help repair photos that didn't turn out quite right.

The most impressive feature of the bunch is a tool that the company says will be able to remove blur from photographs that was caused by camera shake. The company demonstrated the tool for The Verge using a photograph of a painting hung in a museum — though we haven't had the chance to play around with it ourselves, when demonstrated by Adobe the tool did an impressive job at recovering detail that had been lost. The company first showed off the feature in 2011, and more than a few photographers with unsteady hands will be happy to see that's finally shipped

Adobe is also including two other additions to help keep photos sharp. The company says that an improved version of Photoshop's automatic sharpening algorithm will better detect what you're trying to sharpen. In a demonstration, Adobe presented how the tool determined that it should focus primarily on certain foreground objects, rather than adding unneeded grain and detail to softer objects in the background as the tool did in CS6. The app's upscaling tool is also said to create more detailed images than before. When enlarging an image, small features that might normally become softened should better retain definition after the update.

The rest of the suite is seeing a number of improvements as well. In Illustrator, users can now apply basic alterations to individual characters of text and then change each letter later on while the changes remain applied. The company has also built an iPhone app for Kuler, an Adobe web service used to build and share color swatches. The new app detects a set of colors using the iPhone's camera, and then sends that color sequence into Illustrator itself. Other video-focused applications in the suite are receiving updates that allow settings to be synced across workstations.

Just read through this after you posted it on Twitter, I think this is a great move for Adobe, Here where I work they are already using the Subscription model for use of Adobe products the only problem i have with it is, this i great for business but not very good from the home based photoshop users. the cost is too much however, i suppose with the smaller initial cost its not so bad.

Gah, I so hate this "cloud" buzzword misnomer. It just won't go away anytime soon, it seems.

So, anyway, they're grown tired that the best part of Reddit etc. crowd uses Ps for all their 'shopping needs, but nobody ever coughs up. No subscription is going to change that! Folks will either find a way (like, for example, retail clones have been replaced by "steamrips") or suffice with CS6 as the "last usable version /s".

Let's no kid ourselves. This is all about piracy. What percentage of current Photoshop users actually paid for their product?

20%?

That's optimistic. However while I generally don't agree that the whole "they would'nt have bought it anyway" excuse is a valid on and often false. In the case of photoshop however, it is indeed true, mostly because of the price, the millions who use pirated PS couldn't afford it for their use. Granted, for the vast majority of them, they don't need PS and there are cheaper and free alternatives that may even be better. But still they ae cutting off a large amount of amateur photographers and learners who would upgrade to a paid version when they can.

But yeah, this is pretty much all about piacy and increased profits, most PS users don't need the cloud. And don't remember for Adobe, subscription for a lot of their users mean more income, as users who would before skip a few version now have to pay a lot more to keep using.

Just read through this after you posted it on Twitter, I think this is a great move for Adobe, Here where I work they are already using the Subscription model for use of Adobe products the only problem i have with it is, this i great for business but not very good from the home based photoshop users. the cost is too much however, i suppose with the smaller initial cost its not so bad.

Everyone knows a student, there should be lots in every family.. I'm getting it for just over £22/month on the discount, i think it's well worth it with behance prosite, typekit, 20gb storage and bleeding edge updates... looking forward to the 17th june.

That's optimistic. However while I generally don't agree that the whole "they would'nt have bought it anyway" excuse is a valid on and often false. In the case of photoshop however, it is indeed true, mostly because of the price, the millions who use pirated PS couldn't afford it for their use. Granted, for the vast majority of them, they don't need PS and there are cheaper and free alternatives that may even be better. But still they ae cutting off a large amount of amateur photographers and learners who would upgrade to a paid version when they can.

But yeah, this is pretty much all about piacy and increased profits, most PS users don't need the cloud. And don't remember for Adobe, subscription for a lot of their users mean more income, as users who would before skip a few version now have to pay a lot more to keep using.

Photoshop piracy probably always helped Adobe. It's basically just a demo for home users, who then go in and convince the companies they work for to buy a license and renew it every release.